“What Happened? Who Am I?”: Aspects Of Child Abuse And Multiple Personality Disorders

8 Pages 1939 Words

personalities, but Dr. C Wilbur did not generally recognize the relationship of multiple personality to child abuse until the publication of Sybil in 1973 (Cohen 49).
Multiple personality disorder is often misused. Patients could be one factor, which could have caused this change in diagnosing multiple personality. Due to the wide spread publicity, hypercondriacs could easily learn the symptoms and believe that they had this disorder. As in the case of Kenneth Bianchi, known as the hillside strangler, the disorder was faked to avoid imprisonment and the death sentence (Allison 4). In faking multiple personality disorder an effort was made by many people to achieve gains which were not available. The condition is multiple personality disorder is often easy to fake because of the lack of knowledge of some clinicians these days. This is just one example of how multiple personality disorder can be misused and mistreated. The doctors may also play a part in the rapid increase of the number of reported cases of multiple personality disorder. The doctors may also want to diagnose multiple personality disorder so they can look good, for example, one of the doctors in the Bianchi case admitted to policemen having given evidence in court that Bianchi had multiple personality disorder. He was on the way to holding the record for the greatest number of multiple personality disorder cases discovered in one career. This is just another reason why it can be misused to get the publicity from the public eye. The lack of knowledge about multiple personality disorder and research into this disorder is another misuse of this disor...